If you want apps that require less permissions, it usually helps to look for paid apps. Free apps always want to know everything about you. As you know "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and people want to know what they're selling.
And if the app isn't what you expected, Google Play gives you a 15-minute window to get your money back.

mikejuk writes: There are aspects of Google that increasingly don't make sense. First they dump App Inventor — a graphical language for Android apps — in a fit of spring cleaning and closures — and now they have launched another Scratch like graphical language, Blockly.However Blockly is different. It works like Scratch or App inventor but it is written in JavaScript. This means it can be included in any web page or web app very easily. This in turn means that it can be used for education, getting people to learn to program, or as an easy to use script generator for the app. The FAQ gives the example of automating GMail filters and mangement.The additional difference is that Blockley can compile its programs to JavaScript, Dart or Python so you can take the script and develop it further.This is a really good idea. As long as Google doesn't throw this one out in a fit of reorganization and spring cleaning, this is a welcome new language.Good luck Blockly!Link to Original Source

Migala77 writes: Now that the third round for Google Code Jam is finished and only 25 contestants are left, we can look at which nationalities performed well and which didn't. Code Jam contestant foxlit has the stats, and some interesting things can be seen. Although there were over 3000 contestants from India in the qualification round (17% of the total) , only 3 of those managed to reach the third round (0.7% of the round 3 contestants) . This in contrast to Russia with 77 out of 747, and Belarus with 13 out of 114 reaching the third round. The US performed somewhat below average too, with only 25 out of 2166 contestants making it to the third round.Are Indian and, to a lesser extent, US programmers just not good enough, or is there another explanation?Link to Original Source

The very undirected process a hypothetical Deist god would set in motion (evolution) is specifically what Intelligent Design claims does not work.

People who believe in both Intelligent Design and evolution, and also have some knowledge of the science behind evolution and natural selection, don't necessarily say that evolution on its own cannot produce the creatures that we see, but rather say that it is so statistically unlikely that it would have required the manipulation of probability by some intelligent deity to arrive at the results we have.

But all the millions/billions/whatever times the evolution did not produce intelligent creatures we were not there to observe it. You don't know how many failed evolutions you haven't observed, so unlikeliness does not imply manipulation.

I have heard from someone at Oracle that for them it is forbidden to admit any Oracle software has security bugs. All public references to something that turns out to be a security bug will be removed or replaced with some non-related issue. As in TFA: "... a number of Oracle sources for this story [...] noted that Oracle licensing agreements prevented them from commenting on any aspect of their product usage".
Infoworld delaying the story is not an example, but security through obscurity seems to be The Oracle Way.

Firefox developers have been claiming that plugins were to blame for a long time (and for some FF versions they may have even been right, judging from TFA). However, there was no way to do something about it, or even just find out which plugin was the problem. TFA finally gets this:

Although these leaks are not Mozilla’s fault, they are Mozilla’s problem. Many Firefox users have add-ons installed -- some people have 20 or 30 or more -- and Firefox gets blamed for the sins of its add-ons.

Now they are going to improve reviews and make it possible to mark add-ons as memory-hogs / -leakers.

I think they just followed the spec. They may have wondered why their customer (your company) wanted shoddy work, and didn't specify any error handling. Cultural differences and/or physical distance (timezones, difficulty of contacting eachother) causes them to handle the same situation differently than a local contractor would. Together this all leads to an undesirable outcome. That doesn't mean they are bad programmers, or that they are trying to screw you over.